Lawrence Ferlinghetti is known the world over as a poet, publisher, bookstore proprietor, activist, and cultural icon. Painting, comparatively, is one of his lesser-known talents.
In the July/August 2012 issue of Poetry Magazine, in an article called "More Light" Ferlinghetti said “I never wanted to be a poet, it chose me, I didn’t choose it, one becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgment. I wanted to be a painter, but from the age of ten, these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.”1
Ferlinghetti first took up painting in 1948 while living in Paris on the G.I. Bill, attending the Sorbonne. From an extended interview in 2014 with John Held Jr. for SFAQ he said “I have a hard time being recognized as a painter, and not just a poet who also paints. It’s really a drag to get that all the time, because I was painting before I ever had any poetry published at all, or anything published, as far as writing goes. I was painting in Paris when I wasn’t writing. I was just too busy to promote myself as a painter. I didn’t hang out with any of those San Francisco painters. They didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti marked his 101st year in 2020 with his first solo exhibition in New York City. As John Yau remarked, in reviewing the show for Hyperallergic, and, specifically, his 1983 painting, “Those Unrelenting Destinies:” “This image convinced me that Ferlinghetti is an artist who ought to be looked at more closely, that he is not simply a poet who happens to make art. I wondered if one reason why we have been so slow to look at his art—at least on the East Coast—is because we think we already know who he is and what he has done, which is formidable.”
The intention of this website is to honor and acknowledge Lawrence Ferlinghetti as a painter...who happens to also be a poet.
